AFS Connections- Building Community

Middle School Visitors
This morning we were joined by four middle school students who were participating in the 'service learning' program as a part of the middle school curriculum at AFS. As a part of the program, students choose activities on and off campus to further their learning of what is service within the community. A group of 12 middle school students chose to come spend time in Early Childhood joining in the excitement and learning of our four classrooms and building relationships with our Cardinals. The four students in our classroom shared their personal interests with us and we introduced them to our interests and the different centers of our room. Our new friends joined us in exploring the sensory activity at the back table, reading and building on our front rug, and even shared our snack.

Ariel, Ali, Drew and Kevin were the Middle School 7th and 8th graders that spent the morning with.  The children absolutely loved meeting new friends in our school community and thoroughly  enjoyed interacting and playing with older students.  The joy that was experienced by both age groups was quite beautiful to see and all of the teachers commented on how meaningful these types of cross divisional experiences are for all students involved.  By the end of the morning, the Cardinals were quite attached to our new friends and we already have begun to make plans for our next meeting time together.  Roseanne,  one of our Middle School science teachers invited us to visit her science classroom in Middle School.
 

 
 Vegetable Guessing Game
Over the past several weeks, the kids have been making mud pies outsides, cakes and apples and oranges out of play dough, and interest in food and cooking has been steadily growing. While we were sharing our Choice Time with our Middle School visitors, a special friend from our  AFS  Physical Ed. department came into our classroom with a fun activity to play with us.  Nikki teaches health and physical education to the older students and she asked if she could spend a little time with our class today to talk about healthy food choices.   She shared with us that today was "'Food Day': a nationwide celebration and a movement for healthy, affordable, and sustainable food", and in this spirit we played a guessing game of vegetables. We split up into four groups, one with each middle school friend, and she held up all sorts of vegetables and gave us clues about what they might be. Using our excellent detective skills, and our knowledge of these healthy foods, we gave our guesses to our Middle School partners who wrote them down for us to see how many we could identify. The foods included corn, asparagus, potatoes, and even artichokes. Our class did amazingly well, even correctly identifying tricky vegetables like cauliflower! This activity has further inspired our Cardinal teachers to explore other outlets for our children's foodie tendencies and we have begun planning for a walk to our local Acme later this week to see the vegetables  We are curious if we can find these same vegetables in the market when we go and we are beginning to think of foods we may want to cook .  We will make a 'market list ' together before we go to the Acme for a walk engage in a discussion about "what we think we may see at the Acme" and "what questions we may have about the Acme." Creating language experience charts and facilitating discussions support our language and literacy curriculum in such a meaningful way.

Second Grade Readers
Our second grade reading partners visited with us today also!

One of the goals that the 2nd grade teachers have for establishing this relationship is that reading to the younger children  gives them a real purpose for reading aloud not just to themselves or in groups but to someone else.  It is a wonderful  chance to practice being the older member of a group and  it  also supports our school wide goals of building community.  Prior to coming for their second  visit,  the 2nd grade students were asked to come up with a question or  a couple of questions to ask the younger children in their reading group . They needed to plan and prepare for their visit in addition to practicing their reading aloud skills.  The experience was really fantastic and we again, plan to continue this school connection.

As is quite apparent, our children are making more and more connections each and everyday to our larger AFS community.  We feel so fortunate that we are able to provide the types of connections that truly build relationships  in such a meaningful way for young children.